Startup template for building games with PandaJS

1. About
2. Why
3. Setup
4. Tools
5. Workflows
6. Deployment
7. Vercel

• Panda2.io is a HTML5 game development platform made by Eemeli Kelokorpi. It's based on Goodboy's PixiJS renderer v2 and while it is the less popular compared to its contemporaries, it offers a relatively simpler learning curve. Also, the documentation provided is easy enough for anyone to pickup / learn the basics of game development and start building their games in no time.
• While Panda2 provides a powerful editor and bundling / deployment to multi-platforms, the engine itself is open source and can be updated using the panda-toolkit library.

Update: Panda2 is no longer maintained and their website is down but the most recent engine release still works well enough for production use cases.

Resources

• Engine Documentation: https://www.panda2.io/docs/api
• Playground Examples: https://www.panda2.io/examples
• Repository for engine: https://github.com/ekelokorpi/panda-engine

• Although Panda2.io offers a powerful editor with features like bundling apps into different platforms, and easy assets & plugin management, my main use of the engine is mainly for creating web applications. Needless to say, in my personal development environment I prefer to use my own editors, with several base configurations such as (prettier/eslint).
• This project is mainly aimed to help those who wish to quickly develop web based games using Panda2 engine and build / deploy them to production and also have a sample configuration that helps maintain their code readability and maintainability.

1. Install the dependencies of the project:

npm run i

2. Create a panda2 project with the latest dev version of the engine:

npm run init

1. Updates the game engine to latest version according to https://github.com/ekelokorpi/panda-engine :

npm run update-engine

1. Serves the development build of the game locally, watches for any file changes in the game project folder:

npm run dev

2. Serves a production build of the game locally:

npm run serve

3. Creates a production build of the game and bundles it into the public folder:

npm run build

Perform an npm run build command and the production build of the game should be available for deployment in the public folder. Be sure to setup the project with the game engine via npm run init or else the build command will fail.

All you have to do is link the project's repository to your account. Setting the build process npm run build and public as the output directory would do the trick.

Vercel deployment link connected with this repository can be found below:

https://create-pandajs-game.vercel.app

*Do note that since the repository is merely a template and doesn't include the Panda2 engine by default, the build script is using npm run build:ci as it includes the npm run init command necessary to setup the Panda2 engine source files needed to complete the build process.

*If you have ran the initial setup via npm run init and pushed the game folder to your repository, just simply doing npm run build should work fine.